Abstract
This chapter presents an introduction to key notions of Schleiermacher’s (gender) philosophy and discusses his distinctive contribution to German Idealism. The author ventures into a deconstructive reading of the gender theory in Brouillon on Ethics 1805–1806. The originality and subversive dynamics of Schleiermacher’s approach are illuminated, as well as the unresolved tensions within his own thinking.
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Notes
- 1.
Friedrich Schleiermacher in a letter to Charlotte von Kathen, August 4, 1804. Brief no. 1802, in KGA 7.
- 2.
I would like to thank the members of our Dutch Schleiermacher reading group, in particular Dick Boer, Rinse Reeling Brouwer, and Nicolaas Groot, for their valuable comments to an early draft of this chapter.
- 3.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
- 4.
Dick Boer, “Rethinking Schleiermacher. Warum wir ihn nicht verachten sollten,” Texte und Kontexte 150 (2016): 39–52.
- 5.
Marilyn Chapin Massey, Feminine Soul: The Fate of an Ideal (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985).
- 6.
Katherine M. Padilla, The Embodiment of the Absolute: Theories of the Feminine in the Works of Schleiermacher, Schlegel, and Novalis (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1988).
- 7.
Dawn De Vries, “Schleiermacher’s Christmas Eve Dialogue: Bourgeois Ideology or Feminist Theology?” The Journal of Religion 69 (1989): 169–183.
- 8.
Ruth Drucilla Richardson, The Role of Women in the Life and Thought of the Early Schleiermacher (1768–1806): An Historical Overview (Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991).
- 9.
Patricia Guenther-Gleason, On Schleiermacher and Gender Politics (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1997).
- 10.
Elisabeth Hartlieb, Geschlechterdifferenz im Denken Friedrich Schleiermachers (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2006).
- 11.
Heleen Zorgdrager, Theologie die verschil maakt: Taal en sekse-differentie als sleutels tot Schleiermachers denken [Theology that makes a difference: Language and gender difference as keys to Schleiermacher’s thought] (Zoetermeer: Boekencentrum, 2003).
- 12.
Other studies worth mentioning here are Thandeka, “Schleiermacher, Feminism, and Liberation Theologies: A Key,” in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, ed. Jacqueline Mariña (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 287–305; Julia A. Lamm, “Schleiermacher’s Christmas Dialogue as Platonic Dialogue,” The Journal of Religion 92, no. 3 (2012): 392–420; Shelli M. Poe, Essential Trinitarianism: Schleiermacher as a Trinitarian Theologian (London, New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017).
- 13.
Hartlieb, Geschlechterdifferenz, 57, note 2, defines “gender coding” as the connotation of a concept or fact, in which this concept or fact is assigned to male or female within the frame of a binary gender model; the assignment results from the socially structuring and symbolically ordering function of the category of gender within a social system.
- 14.
Hartlieb, Geschlechterdifferenz, 57–58.
- 15.
For critical discussions of the gender theory in Brouillon, see Richardson, The Role of Women, 119–128; Zorgdrager, Theologie die verschil maakt, 100–122; Hartlieb, Geschlechterdifferenz, 138–155.
- 16.
Paul Peucker, A Time of Sifting: Mystical Marriage and the Crisis of Moravian Piety in the Eighteenth Century (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015). Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760) was a German nobleman, a religious and social reformer, founder of the Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine, and a pioneer in Christian mission. He provided shelter on his estate for German-speaking exiles from Moravia who had been forced to fled because of their Protestant faith. The settlement on Zinzendorf’s estate was called Herrnhut, which means “the Lord’s watchful care” or “the Lord’s protection.” Zinzendorf, influenced by Lutheran Pietism, began to reorganize the Moravian community into a form of communal Christian living, by establishing family-like “choirs” based on age, marital status, and gender. In his theology, he expressed the human longing for connection with the divine in the very physical terms of human marriage and sexuality.
- 17.
See for the English translation Richardson, The Role of Women, 60–61.
- 18.
F.H. Jacobi, Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn (Breslau: Gottl. Löwe, 1785).
- 19.
My translation of: “… und so alles Einzelne als einen Theil des Ganzen, alles Beschränkte als eine Darstellung des Unendlichen hinnehmen, das ist Religion”.
- 20.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); see Brent W. Sockness, “Schleiermacher and the Ethics of Authenticity: The Monologen of 1800,” Journal of Religious Ethics 32, no. 3 (2004): 477–517.
- 21.
“Das principium individui ist das Mystischste im Gebiet der Philosophie …”.
- 22.
Cited in Theodore Vial, Schleiermacher: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013), 56.
- 23.
Frederick C. Beiser, “Schleiermacher’s Ethics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, ed. Jacqueline Mariña (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 61.
- 24.
Schleiermacher specifies it in the second edition of Speeches, 1806: “This indeed is the one and all of religion: to feel everything moving us in feeling in its highest unity as one and all, and to feel everything individual and particular as imparted through this, and therefore to feel our existence and life as an existence and life in and through God.” In The Christmas Dialogue, The Second Speech, and Other Selections, trans. and ed. Julia A. Lamm, 152–223 (New York, Mahwah: Paulist Press, 2014), 181.
- 25.
Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760–1860. The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 153.
- 26.
Italics by the author of this chapter.
- 27.
The flute concert of Friedrich Ludwig Dülon on December 3, 1805, which inspired him to write the novella, caused him to cancel a lecture of ethics; in the margins of the manuscript of the 30th lesson Schleiermacher wrote: “Eine Stunde ausgesezt wegen Dulons concert,” (Brou 51).
- 28.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, trans. Michael Baur, ed. Frederick Neuhouser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); System of Ethics, trans. and ed. Stefano Bacin and Owen Ware (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). See also the chapter by Christoph Binkelmann and Marion Heinz in this volume.
- 29.
See also the chapter by Friederike Kuster in this volume.
- 30.
Schleiermacher opposes “the usual formulas of transcendental philosophy that abstracts universal objective knowledge from any individuality” (Brou 99).
- 31.
Emphasis on this aspect in Leendert Oranje, God en wereld. De vraag naar het transcendentale in Schleiermacher’s “Dialektik” (Kampen: Kok, 1968); Zorgdrager, Theologie die verschil maakt; Shelli Poe, Trinitarian Essentialism; Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft, The Veiled God: Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Theology of Finitude (Leiden: Brill, 2019).
- 32.
Albert L. Blackwell, Schleiermacher’s Early Philosophy of Life: Determinism, Freedom, and Phantasy (Chico: Scholars Press, 1982), 90; Günther Scholtz, Die Philosophie Schleiermachers (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984), 118; Hans-Joachim Birkner, Schleiermachers Christliche Sittenlehre im Zusammenhang seines philosophisch-theologischen Systems (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1964), 39.
- 33.
“…die Art, wie das fremde Leben das unsrige ergreift”.
- 34.
See Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism. And Other Writings, trans. and ed. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik. Mit einem Anhang sprachphilosophischer Texte Schleiermachers, ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1993); Manfred Frank, Einführung in die frühromantische Ästhetik. Vorlesungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989); Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967); L’Écriture et la difference (Paris: Seuil, 1967); Zorgdrager, Theologie die verschil maakt, 139–147.
- 35.
He calls divination also the “psychological” method, which has led to great misunderstanding, in the reception by influential authors such as Wilhelm Dilthey and Hans-Georg Gadamer, that it would be a kind of romantic hermeneutics striving towards congeniality with the author. See, for example, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer philosophen Hermeneutik (Tuebingen: JCB Mohr, 2010), 267.
- 36.
Julie Ellison, Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding, 17–99 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).
- 37.
Ellison, Delicate Subjects, 81.
- 38.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (Amsterdam: Marc-Michel Rey, 1761); Émile ou De l’ éducation (The Hague: Jean Néaulme, 1762).
- 39.
Next to Kant and Fichte, the concept has a prominent place in Wilhelm von Humboldt, Über den Geschlechtsunterschied und dessen Einfluss auf die organische Natur [1794], in Wilhelm von Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, ed. Albert Leitzmann, 311–335 (reprint Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968); Über die männliche und weibliche Form [1795], in Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, 335–369.
- 40.
In German: “es wäre toll,” which in modern German clearly has a different meaning than in Schleiermacher’s time.
- 41.
Plato, Symposium: The Benjamin Jowett Translation (New York: Modern Library, 1996), 105.
- 42.
“Wie in der Naturbetrachtung alles eins ist und harmonisch, so auch in der ethischen überspringen wir den Zwiespalt. Das Böse ist an sich nichts und kommt nur zum Vorschein mit dem Guten zugleich, inwiefern dies als ein Werdendes gesetzt wird” (Brou 7).
- 43.
Thandeka, “Schleiermacher, Feminism, and Liberation Theologies,” 299.
- 44.
Hartlieb misses the full critical implications of these reflections on the child as a reproduction of the genus and on the brother-sister relationship. See Hartlieb, Geschlechterdifferenz, 147, note 305, and 120, note 210.
- 45.
I refer to the chapter on Hegel’s Antigone in this volume. For a deconstructive reading of Hegel’s Antigone, see Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974), who also includes Hegel’s letter to his sister Christiane from August 12, 1821. See also the chapters by Elena Tzelepis and Kimberly Hutchings in this volume.
- 46.
Wilhelm Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers, vol. I.1: 1768–1802 [1870], ed. Martin Redeker (Berlin: De Gruyter 1970), 543. The manuscript of this letter was still available to Dilthey but has since been lost.
- 47.
See Hartlieb, Geschlechterdifferenz, 149.
- 48.
See ibid., 152–153.
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Zorgdrager, H. (2022). Sister, Spouse and a Subversive Split: The Ambiguous Place of Gender in Schleiermacher’s Philosophy. In: Lettow, S., Pulkkinen, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism and Feminist Philosophy. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13123-3_21
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